Over the last decade there has been dramatically increased growth and interest in the movement of edible perishables by air, not only in the U.S. but worldwide. The World Air Cargo Industry flew an estimated 6 billion pounds of seafood and 19 billion pounds of produce in 1985. Distant access to fresh products for health, taste, and off-season supply are driving forces in the current import/export growth in many countries and will fuel even greater growth of the future.
Fresh edibles marketing has matured more rapidly than the specialized transport structure needed to provide distribution high product quality control. Specialized packaging is either non-existent or woefully inadequate. This unsatisfactory environment creates waste, disenchantment and/or health and it works toward destroying markets.
The University of California at Davis estimates that 25% of the world's produce is never eaten, because of inefficient transportation systems between the source and the consumer that results in total loss.
Conventional means for packaging goods subject to spoilage such as fish includes packaging the goods in a bag, surrounding the goods with a refrigerant such as Gel-Pack which is then placed in a box with polystyrene insulation walls in order to retard the refrigerant from melting. The box is typically a corrugated type carton. One problem with this type of packaging is that the only insulation for the refrigerant is the polystyrene. Another problem is that the insulation boxes must be shipped inside the corrugated carton boxes and this takes up a considerable amount of space on the pallets. It is therefore preferable to be able to provide collapsible insulation boxes so that more of them can be stored on the pallets. In addition, the corrugated boxes can be shipped in their flat, unassembled form as well, thereby reducing shipping and storage costs significantly.
It is therefore desirable to provide a highly insulative packaging structure which is light weight, less costly for storage and shipping purposes, and which is reusable for further shipping.